ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED (K3500P) review

ASUS is making a serious bet on OLED displays in laptops – more and more such models have been recently released in the line of this manufacturer. One of such novelties is ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED, which we are going to review.
 

Specifications

Design and layout

Externally, the ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED is very similar to another “vivobook” – a mid-range model ASUS Vivobook Pro 16X OLED, which was in our review in January . The novelty also has a relatively compact and thin aluminum alloy body, and is available in two colors – silver (Cool Silver) and dark (Quiet Blue). We came across the last one – “blue” in its name refers to the lower part of the case – if you look closely, it has a faint shade of blue, while the lid of the laptop is dark gray.

As in some other models, the metal in the case is used only on the outside – inside the plastic case. The frames around the screen are quite wide – 8 mm on the sides and ~ 12 mm on top, in total the screen occupies 84% of the lid area. The webcam lens can be closed with a bright orange physical “curtain” – so the user immediately pays attention to whether it is open or closed.

The body feels strong, it does not bend or creak. It is quite easy to open the lid with one hand, you do not need to hold the “base”. The maximum opening angle is approximately 130 °. The hinges are quite tight, they fix the screen well in any position.

All interface connectors are located on the side panels: two USB 2.0 can be found on the left, HDMI 1.4 on the right, full-size USB 3.2 Gen 1, USB-C with DisplayPort and Power Delivery support, Micro SD card reader and 3.5 mm hybrid audio jack. Ventilation holes are located at the bottom and back, so hot air comes out mostly behind the lid, not on the sides, and does not cause discomfort when using the mouse.

Keyboard, touchpad

ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED is equipped with an island-type keyboard, the keystroke is typical for a laptop – 1.35 mm. The keyboard is full-fledged, with an additional digital unit – it is narrower than the traditional desktop (~ 47 mm), but the ease of use is almost unaffected. The main block of keys is almost the same size as desktop keyboards – a little less than 27 cm wide, so you don’t have to get used to a different key layout and size for blind printing. The case does not bend during typing – to force it to do so, you need to intentionally and strongly press the keyboard.

The layout is almost standard ANSI, with long left Shift and single-line Enter. The arrow control unit is embedded in the main unit, under the right Shift – for this we had to reduce the space and move the right Alt and Ctrl to the left. The power button is located in the upper right corner, next to the top keys, just above NumLock, but unlike, say, ASUS Vivobook Pro 16X OLED, in this model it is not sunk into the body, so there is a zero chance to miss and accidentally press her instead of NumLock. As in the previous model, the ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED has a built-in fingerprint scanner.

The keys have a white backlight, with three levels of intensity and the ability to turn off completely. The backlight is quite moderate, but the dark keys are clearly visible – it is likely that the silver version will be less noticeable if the room has more or less decent lighting (at least so was the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED, which “came to us” in this color).

The touchpad is quite large – 130×75 mm, and easy to use. Unlike the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED, it does not have the DialPad “virtual wheel” function. The mouse keys are pressed gently, with a little effort (the right key is a little “tighter” than the left).

Screen

The ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED uses a 15.6-inch OLED panel made by Samsung (ATNA56YX03-0). Resolution – Full HD, 16: 9 aspect ratio, dot density – 141 PPI, refresh rate standard, 60 Hz.

MyASUS utility allows you to choose different Splendid video modes – Normal, Lively, Manual and Eye Care. They have the same color coverage which is quite extensive – 100% DCI-P3 coverage, 96% Adobe RGB, no emulation of sRGB color space.

In normal mode, the gamma almost perfectly corresponds to the standard value of 2.2, the color temperature is permanent over the entire brightness range and is 6500-6700K, which is also almost exactly the standard (6500K). The brightness in SDR mode is adjustable in the range from 4 to 400 cd / m². Also, this display supports HDR mode (the laptop is certified DisplayHDR True Black 600): it has a peak brightness of up to 630 cd / m2 – according to these indicators the screen is identical to what we saw in the ASUS Vivobook Pro 16X OLED (where it was also produced Samsung). And just like it, if you turn on HDR in the Windows settings in the Vivobook Pro 15 OLED, the color gamma for regular content is also reduced to the size of the sRGB space. Due to the lack of additional illumination, the OLED panel shows excellent results in tests for uniformity of brightness and color temperature over the entire screen area: maximum fluctuations of these parameters do not exceed a few percent (in the case of conventional LCD screens typical deviations are usually more than 10%, if not 20 %). The display has Pantone validation, and the color accuracy in Normal mode is very high – the average value of ΔE is less than one, the maximum – less than two (we remind, it is believed that the average user can not notice deviations in color display if this parameter is lower than 2 or even 3).

Traditionally for OLED technology, the brightness is regulated by pulse-width modulation, so at low levels (below 100 cd / m²) there is a slight flicker of the display. However, the brightness, at which flicker is not felt even by the sensitive eye, is quite moderate and fully corresponds to the brightness recommended for office work. And to use the laptop in a dark room, when you want to reduce the brightness to a minimum, you can use the option Shading without flicker OLED – in fact, this is the same DC Dimming, which can be found in some smartphones with OLED screens. The corresponding slider effectively reduces the brightness to 4 cd / m² without noticeable flicker – although this feature does not work with HDR mode and is not as convenient as traditional brightness control with hot keys. However, if your eyes are tired of OLED flicker, this option will be indispensable when working in a dark room.

The main advantages of OLED over conventional LCD displays are, of course, completely black color due to the lack of additional illumination in the panel and maximum viewing angles.

When viewed from the side of the screen ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED image remains as saturated and almost as bright as in the usual position behind the laptop.

The second mode – Lively, offers a slightly richer and brighter image, but the difference is insignificant, in addition, the accuracy of color reproduction is much worse, so we would recommend using the Normal mode on a regular basis. Manual mode allows you to manually adjust the color temperature in the range of 5600-8000K, all other features including color accuracy are almost identical to Normal, and Eye Care mode reduces blue light, making the image warmer and more comfortable for long use, especially when working on a white background.
 

Hardware platform

The ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED model line (K3500P) uses 11th generation Intel processors – Intel Core i5-11300H or i7-11370H (as well as the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED N7600); the first option is installed in the model that came to us for review.

Intel Core i5-11300H is a quad-core 8-stream processor of the Tiger Lake H35 family, which was announced in 2021. It is focused on use in thin laptops, produced by 10-nm process technology, the typical TDP of the processor is 35 watts, but can be reduced to 28 watts. The base frequency is 2.6 GHz and can rise to 4.4 GHz under load per core (up to 4 GHz for all cores). The processor has a built-in Iris Xe graphics with 80 computing units, running at 1300 MHz.

In addition, depending on the configuration, the ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED (K3500P) can also be equipped with a discrete graphics card – GeForce GTX 1650 Max Q 4 GB or GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU 4 GB with a thermal package of 35 watts. RAM is soldered to board, so there is no way to add more capacity. In the current configuration, the laptop is equipped with 16 GB of DDR4, which works in dual-channel mode (also available with 8 GB).

The specifications of the M.2 NVMe SSD may differ depending on the configuration of the laptop – its capacity can be 512 GB or 1 TB. The laptop can have two versions of wireless modules – Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) + Bluetooth 5.0 or Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) + Bluetooth 4.2.

ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED performance

Intel Core i5-11300H demonstrates high performance in various tasks, and in complex synthetic benchmarks is slightly inferior to the results we obtained on the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED (in which the i7-11370H was installed). M.2 NVMe SSD (Intel SSDPEKNU512GZ with a capacity of 512 GB) has a fairly high performance: read response time is 3000 MB / s, write response – a little more than 1600 MB / s.

The MyASUS utility allows you to select different performance modes from the Fan mode menu. By default, the Standard mode is set, which is universal and offers the optimal balance between performance and noise of the cooling system. For maximum battery life (and silent mode) there is Whisper mode, and if you want to get maximum performance – Performance Mode.

We compared the performance of the system in them using the Cinebench R23 utility during loading on all cores. In the Standard mode, the allocated thermal package of the processor was 32 W, its temperature rose to 75 degrees, it worked at an average frequency of 3.4-3.5 GHz, the noise level was quite low (~ 40 dB at a distance of 1 m from the laptop). In Performance Mode, the thermal package increased to 47 watts, the CPU temperature rose to 94 degrees, the frequency – to 3.9-4 GHz. The noise of the cooling system also increased significantly – up to about 47-48 dB. If you look at the results in Cinebench R23, you can see that the performance during single-threaded tasks remains unchanged, while in multi-threaded mode, the increase in productivity is quite significant.

During the stress test of system stability in AIDA64 in Standard mode, the utility initially recorded a small throttling when the system was running at slightly higher frequencies for this mode, about 4 GHz, but soon the system reduced CPU frequencies to ~ 3.2 GHz and throttling disappeared. If you switch to Performance Mode, the processor in this test is constantly running at frequencies of ~ 4 GHz, and the utility formally records a small constant throttling (on average about 5%).

AIDA64 System Stability Test (Standard/Performance):

Although the laptop, like other models in the Vivobook line, is not positioned as a gaming device, the presence of discrete video GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop allows you to occasionally use it as such. As we have repeatedly seen on the example of other laptops with such a graphics card, the speed of the system is quite enough to comfortably play modern games in Full HD resolution with medium graphics quality settings.

Gaming performance, Full HD, average graphics quality:

Battery life

The laptop is equipped with a battery with a capacity of 63 Wh – it’s not much, but given the relatively thin body, it is quite decent. Interestingly, with this battery ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED demonstrates very good battery life – at a brightness of 120 cd/m² in the battery benchmark test PCMark 10, it worked more than 9 hours in office mode and 12.5 hours in standby mode. If you switch the cooling mode from Standard to Whisper, the result in standby mode will increase by two hours. As for the gaming option, there are no surprises – if you have a discrete graphics card, the laptop in the test could last a little more than an hour.